kinbarichan
113p
46 comments posted · 0 followers · following 0
10 years ago @ The Toast - Link Roundup! · 1 reply · +4 points
10 years ago @ The Toast - Link Roundup! · 9 replies · +4 points
I had one truly terrifying experience in Utah that has all the hallmarks of an encounter with Super Low Frequency - shared feelings of terror, dread, a sense of imminent doom, hallucinations - all of which dissipated when we left. It was a harrowing experience, but it can be explained. (It was dark, so we couldn't see what might have been resonating - maybe the wind through rocks?)
But - I've had experiences which were straight-up inexplicable. When my sister and I were nine and ten, we were home alone, watching TV - and the bathroom sink began running full force. The bathroom door was in full view of the living room sofa - we would have seen someone enter, if anyone were there. When we turned off the water, both faucets had been cranked all the way open. It only happened once, but I've never been able to figure out an explanation for it.
When I was older, I worked at a summer camp. For about two weeks, there were mysterious red marks that appeared throughout the pool building - first, a full red handprint in one of the bathroom stalls - not blood, not paint, more the texture of lipstick, but not the smell. When I rubbed it with my fingers, they were stained with red pigment, which was hard to wash off. I was roommates with the lifeguard, the only person with a key to the pool building; we both thought it was a practical joke and decided not to tell anyone, in hopes that the prankster would reveal themselves by asking about the red smudges and smears that were revealing themselves in multiple places inside the building.
Nobody asked, yet the marks kept appearing, in the oddest places - in the back of a closet, on the edge of a crash door, under a bag of styrofoam peanuts, on a floor that had been scrubbed clean just a half-hour before.
The marks stopped appearing after two weeks.
We never found out who did it, we never found out why, and I've never come across any oily pigmented (it never dried either!) substance to match the marks in the pool building. It's a mystery!
Last, we rented a lake house in Japan for a week, and, for the first two nights, the attic light kept turning on and off during the night. Nobody was up there, there was no practical cause of the light going on and off, (I checked the wiring, the switch, the socket, and the bulb) and there was no explanation- I tried my best to find one, because I would choose Science over Spirits every day, if I could.
So yes, Low Frequency can explain the things you feel, but not the documentable things that happen.
10 years ago @ The Toast - Link Roundup! · 0 replies · +33 points
We are all Pharoah and we carry the world into our tomb.
10 years ago @ The Toast - Link Roundup! · 1 reply · +3 points
10 years ago @ The Toast - Confessions of an Ambi... · 1 reply · +14 points
Things look very different when you're a leader - the sleepover at the science museum, the sleepover at the aquarium - the program coordinators think that a 1:00 am bedtime is perfectly acceptable, but there is something peculiarly disagreeable about having to wrangle large groups of small girls after midnight - exhausted beyond all patience, the girls just want to lie down, and I am stuck telling that one mother (purportedly here as a 'chaperone', really here to push her kid to the front of every line) that no, she can't set up a queen-sized air mattress for her little princess right in front of the beluga exhibit because all the girls have to fit into that space, and her daughter's comfort may be important to her, but all the girls' view of the belugas is important to me.
I spent so much time organizing a fair view of the belugas for all the girls that I forgot to claim a space for my daughter and me.
10 years ago @ The Toast - The Pacific Northwest ... · 0 replies · +16 points
10 years ago @ The Toast - The Pacific Northwest ... · 1 reply · +5 points
10 years ago @ The Toast - The Pacific Northwest ... · 1 reply · +31 points
Everyone knew that Tokyo was overdue for a huge earthquake - so many fault lines run under that city, it's like a Fabergé egg perched on top of a stack of shattered dinner plates.
We turned on the TV, expecting to see footage of the ruins of Tokyo - and saw, instead, the ruins of Kobe. Nobody predicted it, nobody expected it - everyone was so busy worrying about the deep faults under Tokyo that they overlooked the shallow fault that ran right beside Kobe.
So yes, the Cascadia Subduction Zone could go off at any time - but so could something else, some unexplored fault that takes everyone by surprise, somewhere not here.
I have to believe that, because otherwise I'd be worried all the time, instead of the currently acceptable 47% of the time that I worry now.
10 years ago @ The Toast - The Pacific Northwest ... · 2 replies · +8 points
But you can always throw your hands in the air and shout, "Whoo - at least I'm not in Tofino!
Or Port Renfrew...
10 years ago @ The Toast - The Pacific Northwest ... · 4 replies · +29 points
So, aside from the deadly cascades of glass falling from all the high-rise condos, the liquefaction of the sandy soil under half of Greater Vancouver and the collapse of civil society that will inevitably follow, Vancouver will be okay.
Also, Canadian earthquake maps go completely blank below the border, so the indifference cuts both ways, I guess.